Keat's Odes

"Bards of Passion and of Mirth" allows us to get a better understanding of the Keatsean view of the poet's function by explaining that a poet's wisdom should be used as a guide that people can use to better understand the human soul and the world around us. This is explained in lines 25 to 27, "And the souls ye left behind you/ Teach us, here, the way to find you,/ Where your other souls are joying." The souls left behind symbolizes the poet's knowledge that he leaves behind in his poetry for people to read and interpret. The poem asks people to use the poet's knowledge as a guide that will eventually lead their souls where the poet's souls are resting in heaven.
The poems seem to link beauty and pain together which can be linked backed to the Romantic idea that life is based on experiencing opposites. Beauty would be the good and pain is the bad but they are intertwined because we can't go through life without seeing one or the other. We need to experience pain to see the beauty in life and vice versa.
In "Ode on Melancholy" on line 21, Keats says of melancholy "She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die;". This means that there is sadness around beauty that is only seen when beauty fades away. Both beauty and pain are always present in life but we usually see one or the other at certain times. This is also true for melancholy and joy. Neither emotion is permanent and as humans, our emotions are constantly changing.
The Romantic belief that human experience is often characterized by pain is true to the extent that painful experiences can be very difficult to deal with for a long time. Once a person experiences something painful, it often increases a person's fear that they may feel that pain again. For example, when someone close to you dies, just the thought of losing someone else can bring you immense pain. Even though life has pain, in a way it allows people to relish happiness even more when they find it due to the hardships they had to go through to get it.
In "Ode on a Grecian Urn", Keats uses a piece of art to display idealistic romantic love which contrasts with the reality of love. The image on the urn represents one moment in time that will never move forward so in a way the love of the man and woman will never fade. This is explained in lines 19 and 20, "She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!". This quote also explains that the woman and man on the urn will remain forever young and fair. They will always desire each other because they are stuck in a moment in time. They will never experience the pain of heartbreak or losing love but they will also never share a kiss and move forward in their relationship.
Keats shows that always desiring something or someone can bring about a very idealistic view that becomes a more realistic view once we get what we desire.Continuously wanting and longing are inevitable human traits because it gives us something to strive for and look forward to. We can't help longing for things even if we know they are not attainable because they can help us escape our everyday realities but they can also hurt us if we are not careful. It is human nature that once we get something, we find something else to long for because what we don't have always seems more desirable.